Animism and Artificial Intelligence: A Practical Guide

The talk opens by defining animism as a set of beliefs found across many cultures, in which people, places, objects and creatures are regarded as having a life essence. The speaker notes that the term began as an anthropological label, describes its relational side around stewardship, ancestry and mutual obligation, and argues that the outlook can be applied to computing as well.

The middle section traces computer history, from room-sized mainframes and lab machines to personal computers, networked servers and cloud data centres, where hardware becomes interchangeable and people relate to it less personally. It then follows the lineage of AI from rule-based systems and the 1960s chatbot ELIZA through statistical machine learning to large language models, explaining how pretraining, fine-tuning and human feedback shape the assistants people use today. Examples include a stuck container ship, treated as a whole-system problem involving software, weather, workers and cargo, and legal cases that gave rivers and wild rice rights-holding standing.

The closing part offers practical takeaways: evaluate AI as a complete system that includes humans rather than only the model, let ethics guidelines account for relationships and stewardship, experiment with open-source models, and explore collaborative storytelling and creative uses. The speaker argues that sentience does not need to be settled before acting responsibly, and closes by urging people to shape the technology together.